I recently picked up the new SparkFun LED Array – 8×7 to try out some hardcore charlieplexing, and so far it’s been working great.

Quoting Wikipedia, charlieplexing is

“…a technique for driving a multiplexed display in which relatively few I/O pins on a microcontroller are used to drive an array of LEDs. The method uses the tri-state logic capabilities of microcontrollers in order to gain efficiency over traditional multiplexing.”

Charlieplexing itself is a simple idea and can be an extremely efficient way of making an LED grid. However, laying out the wiring of a charlieplexed grid, whether on a breadboard or a PCB, can be complicated and require a bit of thinking. It’s easy to layout a grid with 12 or 20 LEDs, but once you start trying to make grids with 30 or more LEDs, it gets a little crazy.

I love SparkFun’s 8×7 LED Array because it eliminates the need to go through the long process of designing and wiring together the grid. Plus it’s in a neat compact module that can be easily embedded. Out of the box, all I had to do was solder on headers and plug it directly into the digital pins on my Arduino. I didn’t need to wire any external resistors, as they’re already built into the board.

SparkFun has made an Arduinolibrary for controlling the array that allows you to easily write text and draw shapes and do other interesting things on the grid. However, I wanted to use my array with my Raspberry Pi’s GPIO for the purpose of making an archaic internet-connected game system. I’ve written a single-file class in Python 3 for controlling the array with the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO, called pythonic-charlie, and you can find it here (my first legit GitHub repo! Woot woot!). It’s still under development, and still has bugs that need smoothing, but it allows you to display a list of coordinates, test the grid to verify that it’s wired properly, and display a neat little screensaver. I’m currently working on something that will display text.

If you ever wanted to learn how to charlieplex LEDs, SparkFun’s 8×7 LED Array is a really great place to start.